I don’t want to dwell on it.’ Nancy tossed her head, making her red hair swing about her shoulders. ‘We none of us know when he’ll be back. It’s too depressing to think about.’
More like Nancy didn’t want Sid back to cramp her style, Rita thought, but decided to keep her thoughts to herself. It couldn’t be easy for Nancy, rattling round in that gloomy big house with a mother-in-law who made no secret of disliking her. As for Mr Kerrigan, nobody ever saw him. He worked nights on the Liverpool Post and kept totally different hours to the rest of his family, which Nancy figured was to stay out of the way of his disagreeable wife. Nancy spent as much of her time as she could in her mother’s house, and had even come back to live there for a while, before Violet had arrived and it had simply become too crowded to contain them all. Reluctantly she’d taken little George back to his other granny.
Rita sighed. She was hardly so squeaky clean herself. She pushed thoughts of the circumstances of her marriage to her husband Charlie out of her mind, feeling too exhausted to think about it now. She loved her work as a nurse, but ever since the local infirmary had been bomb-damaged, she had been working at the hospital on Linacre Lane, a much longer walk away. She didn’t mind the walk itself – especially now that the buses were so unreliable – but the journey there and back combined with long shifts and the weight of responsibility of being a nursing sister wore her out. She reached for the teapot before Nancy could help herself to a refill. Guiltily she realised she was drinking her mother’s tea ration, though Dolly Feeny wouldn’t have begrudged her eldest girl a cup. The whole family were proud of Rita, who’d kept at her post while the docks were bearing the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s devastating raids.
Warming her hands on the cup, Rita leant back. ‘That’s better.’ It was amazing what a drop of tea could do to restore your spirits. ‘Have you heard Mam’s latest?’
Nancy glanced up. ‘No, what?’
‘She’s gone and put her name down for a victory garden. She was talking about it at Christmas and I thought she’d given up the idea, but no. Now the days are getting longer it’ll soon be time to start planting seeds and I don’t know how she’ll manage.’
‘Well, I suppose we could all do with more fresh fruit and veg,’ said Nancy eagerly. Her mouth watered at the thought of strawberries in the summer. Even if there was no cream or sugar to go on them, they could always use evaporated milk.
Trust Nancy to jump straight to how she’d benefit herself, thought Rita. ‘Yes, that’s all very well,’ she persisted in trying to make her point, ‘but how will she find the time? Look at how much she’s doing already. She doesn’t get enough sleep as it is – not that there’s any telling her. We’re all going to have to muck in.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’ Nancy cried hotly. ‘What, go grubbing round in the dirt? Lots of these gardens are just on dug-over plots where bombs have dropped, aren’t they? They’ll be filthy, not even like proper allotments. I’m not having anything to do with it. It’ll ruin my nails.’ She turned her hands to admire the latest shade of polish she’d managed to procure. It wasn’t easy to come by and she had no intention of spoiling her careful manicure by wielding a spade.
‘All the more for us, then.’ Rita drained her tea. Even though her sister was annoying, it was fun to wind her up and it was better than the alternative – going back to her own house and her own difficult mother-in-law. But there was no getting away from it. She rose to her aching feet, steeling herself for the short walk to the corner shop across the mouth of the alley. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Nancy.’
Nancy nodded absent-mindedly as her big sister made her way out of the door. Truth be told, she had more urgent matters to worry about than whether she’d be needed to take a turn on the new vegetable beds. She was sure she could get out of it – she could usually wheedle her way into her mother’s good books and persuade her somehow. There were some things, though, on which her mother wouldn’t budge.
One of those was how the wife of a POW should behave. Both her mother and her father had been very angry with Nancy when her other sister, young Sarah, had accidentally seen her canoodling with a man in a bus shelter back in December. Sarah had clearly been torn in her loyalties and very upset about the whole thing, but in the end had spoken up, more because if anyone else had seen them it would have been ten times worse.
As far as Dolly and Pop were concerned, that was the end of the matter. Nancy had been warned in no uncertain terms that she’d have to watch out for her reputation. It was bad enough to be a fast woman, but to be one when her husband had been taken prisoner in the course of serving his country was not to be contemplated. They had spelled out to her just what sort of reaction she could expect if she continued down that route.
Nancy shut her eyes and remembered. It hadn’t been just any man. It was Stan Hathaway, local boy made good. Even though his grandmother lived just around the corner from Empire Street and his family weren’t anything special, he’d managed to go to university and was now a flight lieutenant in the RAF. If anyone deserved a bit of fun on his precious home leave, it was him. Besides, he made her feel something that no other man had – not even Sid, back in the days when she’d first fallen for him, before she’d taken off the rose-tinted spectacles and realised what he was really like. But by then it had been too late and she’d been pregnant with Georgie. But Stan … he was utterly different. He was sophisticated and smart, and made her think she was those things too when she was with him. She could just imagine his arms around her, his persuasive whisper in her ear, the way her skin seemed to fizz with electricity at his touch.
She started suddenly as a wail came from the room next door. Georgie was awake again and it didn’t sound as if his nap had eased his teething troubles. Carefully she got up, making sure not to catch her precious nylons on the chair. She’d have to wait until Stan’s next leave to get new ones – he always seemed to know a way of finding them, and was only too pleased to give them to her. He used to joke that it was his excuse for finding out if they fitted her properly …
Guiltily she wondered if that tea had tasted right. Maybe she’d got another one of her upset stomachs. She’d had a few of those lately. That was all it was. She wouldn’t even think about the alternative.
Rita pushed open the back door to the living quarters, which were behind and above the corner shop. She paused to listen. In days gone by there would have been the constant buzz of gossip from the shop, as her mother-in-law Winnie Kennedy extracted the juiciest morsels of scandal from anyone and everyone, before selling on her carefully hoarded luxury items that only a select few customers knew about. Sometimes it was as if rationing had never happened. Being so near the docks, there were always folk who could get hold of just about anything for a small consideration, even though this was strictly illegal.
Now there was only silence. Rita groaned inwardly. Winnie had changed, and it wasn’t because of the destruction of so many homes around them or the loss of life that had shattered so many families around Liverpool in general and the docks in particular. In fact most people had become more defiant, nobody wanting to give in to the terror of the bombs. The people of Merseyside had come together and refused to be cowed. But Winnie had retreated into an angry shell.
She had always carried on as if she was a cut above everyone else, and had raised her son Charlie to feel the same. She’d never troubled to hide her resentment of Rita, who had never been good enough for her beloved son. Rita had married Charlie knowing all this only too well, but she’d had little alternative as she’d been pregnant with Michael. She and Jack Callaghan had been young sweethearts, but too young and naïve to realise what they were doing. When Jack had been sent away on his apprenticeship, Rita had panicked – making the worst decision of her life. Many a time over the past eight years she’d berated herself for the choice she’d made, but
